My name is Jacqueline Quesnel and I was trained in Deepak Chopra’s first class.
Everyone calls me “Beanie” and I’m cool with that. My dad was Gerald Montes de Oca. I was an only child for a while. Then my parents split and remarried and both had children. So I have brothers and sisters younger than I am. And my kids have grandparents galore.
My daughter Anya is in Bishop Anstey’s School Choir. She’s the only little blonde, so we have this standing joke: I can always find her in the choir and she can always spot me in the audience.
In their tour in South Africa, I watched the Bishop’s Choir girls in their red, white and black, all so stunningly beautiful in all their different colours, and levels of colours, and they sang, “Trini to D Bone”. It welled up in me: your heart fills and everything tingles when you realise, “This is ours!”
It’s quite an honour and a privilege to have been in Deepak Chopra’s first two classes. One was, “The Magic of Healing”, a brilliant introduction to yoga and Ayurveda, its sister science.
The other was “Primordial Sound Meditation”. I did a separate yoga teacher training.
I lived in Florida for 12 years. I worked as a paediatric nurse at Jackson Memorial Mental Health Department for six years. Because it was a state facility, we had the toughest of the children who had come from many, many foster homes and had significant psychiatric problems. It was draining. I’d get home and not be able to get off the couch.
I became a nurse because my mum was a nurse and I was always interested in healthcare, but I think I was always trying to find yoga. I had been doing yoga with my mum since childhood. I have this memory of being under a mango tree in head-and-shoulder stand with the full moon above.
At university, I took it as a course.
In my nursing career, I found balance was needed. So I started taking yoga classes at a community centre and, after a couple years, the instructors asked me to consider teaching. I got my first certification then. I was taking courses with Deepak, too. At that time he didn’t have the Chopra Centre so I would go for two weeks to the University of California, San Diego campus.
I bring what I learned from Deepak Chopra to bear in my classes every day. When people leave my class, I see in them such a lightness and an ease.
There’s a little toolbox you can use and the breath is the first tool. You’re feeling anxious or stressed? It just takes a moment to shift the breathing a little bit deeper, remember all parts of your lungs, soften your face as you breathe. The other big tool is gratitude. Remember what you’re blessed with. Stress just starts to roll off.
We so often forget that we are gifted with this life and that joy is a big part of honouring the gift we have. Yes, life is hard and, yes, we all make mistakes. But can you take a moment and recognise that, underneath that, there is tremendous support?
We have a habit of holding people who do things in the spiritual realms as “gurus” but Deepak would always say, “Spell ‘guru’: Gee-You-Are-You!” It’s not about the guru! You can’t hold them “up there” because they tend to fall. Well, he hasn’t, because he’s real, but many do.
To relax, I go to a yoga class.
My husband Paul is doing yoga. He used to tell me he was absorbing it by osmosis. He’s been coming for about two months of my 20 years of teaching but I’m happy he’s finally made it!
You say Trinidad & Tobago is home and you think of a place that nurtures you, a place you would like to protect. A place you revel and celebrate in. A really good yoga word to link all that is to say Trinidad has rasa. It has taste. I hadn’t done Jouve for a long time and, this year, Anya begged us, and I got back out there in the early morning and felt the joy, the pulse, the spirit that was there—it’s not opposite to yoga. That exuberance of spirit that reminds you of the divine, Trinidad has that!
• Read a longer version of this feature at www.BCRaw.com
